This invention relates to automated or on-demand dispensing of medicine, such as for an individual patient.
Many people take more than one medicine or dietary supplement on a periodic basis. Each medicine or dietary supplement may have its own rules for consumption, such as, for example, the frequency, the time of day, and the accompanying food or beverage (or absence thereof). For some people, managing even one once-daily medicine can be challenging: it is possible to forget whether the daily dose has been consumed. When a patient must manage more than one medicine, each with its own rules for consumption, the likelihood for confusion, missed doses, overdose, and general noncompliance by the patient increases. Those problems at best reduce the efficacy of the medicine, and at worst, place the patient at significant risk for untreated illness and drug-related injury.
In-home dosage dispensers have been proposed in the past. Oftentimes, the procedure for operating these dispensers is not intuitive, leading to difficulties in use. These difficulties may be exacerbated by the patient's advanced age or medical condition. Typically, the dispensers are refilled by a patient's caregiver, but the refilling process may itself be difficult or error-prone. Moreover, patients on a pharmaceutical regimen may often leave home on a temporary basis, which is difficult to synchronize with the programmed operation of an automatic dispenser.
The present invention recognizes the foregoing considerations, and others, of the prior art.